Look Out! Someone is Watching You…with Googley Eyes! No, It’s Not Actor Marty Feldman.

~by Troy Henley, CBA Director of Information Technology

Google might be your next uninvited house guest. Or at least they want to photograph your home, car and anything else in plain view of their cameras. On the upside, perhaps Google’s new Street View photos will help you “tell your story” in trial by showing the physical location of an event and make that compelling argument which convinces the jury to acquiesce your client’s innocence. Perhaps your new case was generated because of Google Street View maps? Did Google Street View capture some important evidence as their mapping van drove by; an accident, a suspect, an building addition sans permit, a parked car, a construction site without property safety equipment, the physically injured worker’s comp recipient hauling bags of heavy mulch across his yard, the weather conditions the day the google map van drove past, a large pothole, an altercation on the sidewalk, a home owner’s tree branch before it fell into the roadway, dogs without leashes running freely? It’s a long shot but it is possible to find tantalizing case facts. Those stories are beginning to make the news.

Already famous for Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Sky, Google Moon, it’s hard to imagine how you could improve much upon that iconic mapping tool. But Google Street View does just that. Giving you street level views of buildings and places just as you would experience them when driving around in your car. The buildings are up close and in many cities they are offered in high definition….and so is everything else in the camera’s path. From a usability standpoint, it is much easier to find your destination than when you’re looking at the top of a building from Google satellite image of a street map and trying to decipher just which building had the white roof!

What makes Google Street view an exciting and sometimes controversial service is what the Google mapping vehicles accidentally capture on their jaunts through your neighborhood and across the country. There has been a lot of noise made by property owners over privacy rights as well as from concerned parents that unwittingly had their young children captured during the street mapping drive-bye. Google has since been more open to removing content (or at least blurring faces) that users report as being inappropriate or that they feel violates their privacy or poses a security concern. You’ll notice that parts of Washington D.C., actually most of it, has been wiped clean of street level views. Even some of the overhead satellite images have been blurred out. If you GoogleMap “U.S. Naval Observatory, Washington, D.C.” you’ll notice the circular parkway encompassing the observatory and a few embassies has even been blurred out in the aerial satellite views. There must be some really prized assets hidden there amongst the shrubbery because even the White House and Pentagon are viewable in high definition satellite imagery.

Another twist to Google Street View…. the wife that happened to find her husband’s truck in a suspected girlfriend’s driveway, the cat burglar climbing over a home’s privacy fence, college students in search of a tan, cars crashing in a frame-by-frame slow motion replay, house fires, motorcycle accidents, unlicensed construction, building sites missing safety equipment, commercial roofers working without roof-edge safety lines, customers walking out of an adult bookstore and a litany of other “day-in-the-life of America” imagery. (I’m sure a coffee table book is in the works)

Google’s Street View has some compelling uses in the legal community. If you want to take the jury on a site visit where an incident occurred but cannot get the approval of the judge to take the jury out on a long and expensive day trip, consider Google maps. Google Street View will let you cruise right up the road in 360 degree viewing splendor as seen when walking or driving up the road. It is easy to share this with the jury by using a laptop and an LCD projector\screen. Google Street View also lets you “look” around in the image window. Amazingly, the video captured is a nearly complete 360 degree umbrella in a X,Y and Z axis; you can look straight up at the tree canopy hanging over the road, even see an airplane’s skywriting, look down at the road conditions or pan over to see the driver in the car that you are passing in the adjoining lane. Is that a cup of Tim Horton’s or Starbuck’s that he was holding…or was he on his cell phone just before the collision? It would make great trial evidence… if you can find it!

Sometime in late April I was sitting in our family's SUV at a traffic light. Just then, I saw a mini van decorated with small satellite dishes and a blacked-out dome on the roof drive through the intersection. The van was not marked with the Google logo, I don’t think they actually own any of the mapping vehicles, but it had “Street Smart” emblazoned across it. I kept checking to see if Google had updated the street views in my neighborhood. About two months later I saw that street level views of my neighborhood were now available (they will be outlined in blue after clicking the Street View button on Google maps). When I clicked on the street view button I quickly moved the little avatar (a small icon representing a person) up to the intersection a few blocks from my home and sure enough, I can see our vehicle parked at the traffic light where we had been that April day when the Google mapping vehicle drove past. It was late in the evening as I recall and you clearly see the setting sun. Wish I had washed the car.

Geek Speak: Google is now experimenting with a software algorithm that will automatically blur human faces that appear in the street view photos….I’m sure that philandering husband wished it worked equally well on his truck’s license plate.

Google’s new mobile phone operating system called “Android” is also utilizing the street view maps in creative new ways beyond standard driving directions. Google hosted a software developer’s contest which has generated hundreds of new programs, many of which utilize the new social networking concepts of web 2.0 to suggest nearby restaurants to visit or to send an electronic “wink” at other nearby users with the same phone software (GPS enabled phones have become the norm), cruise down the street to see a little icon indicating where the other phone friend is located. This one scares me!

Also, Google is still tweaking the street numbering to sync with the street view images. I’ve typed in a few addresses and found that Google had applied the wrong street number to the property in some cases…though it got me very close to my destination. I simply drove up the virtual street, as I would in a car, until I found the correct building.

A Gallery of Humorous “Things” Caught by Google Street View

Oops, Google Caught a Cheater

I Spy a Luddite

Law.com - Boring Couple Sues Google over Street View (the residence of Aaron and Christine Boring)

Legal Tech for Criminal Defense

Troy G. Henley, I.T. Director, Columbus Bar Association

Binoculars Photo: This photo by Ante Perkovic is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.